Sign of the times

The telephone box at the bottom of the road from my sister's house, taken somewhat ironically with my mobile phone. If I'm anything to go by they're not kidding about how little it gets used. The last time I made a call here, long before my sister moved around the corner, was in 1980. I'd been to a party at the Sheffield Arms at the junction of Gibbon Road and Fort Road in Newhaven and my friend Ian Mitchell’s dad, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, fed me endless pints of foul-tasting bitter and got me horribly drunk. I don’t remember much about the evening, but I do remember I had a packet of 10 Benson & Hedges and that I walked a girl from Seaford home along the beach. I made it as far as this telephone box on the way back home after seeing the girl (whose name I also have no recollection of) to her door and ended up making a reverse-charge call to my sleeping dad in the middle of the night to come and collect me. I guess it must’ve been a different telephone box. They were all still red then. A different universe.